Information technology systems are essential to any modern business. These systems have grown more and more complex. Today they can include distributed centers located anywhere from a few miles apart to those across the continent or in separate countries. Today, personal computers are common and many businesses employ multiple operating systems from various vendors. Often systems are dispersed in branch offices running critical applications or containing essential data.
Tools are available that integrate operational control of multiple heterogeneous mainframes and distributed systems. These systems include multiple components that need to be managed. Managed classes are used to view, monitor, and manage the components. The managed classes are typically predefined in operational software for managing the components of the system. A limited template for class definition has been provided in the past. This template included a predefined set of properties. In addition, real classes were not created but instead these new classes were simulated by the software and behaved differently than the predefined classes. This behavioral difference is disadvantageous.
For these and other reasons, improvements are desirable.